Near the beginning of Susan Faludi’s bold, ambitious, often brilliant new book, The Terror Dream, she relates how a reporter called her on 9/11 for a reaction to his “bizarrely gleeful” assertion that the destruction of the twin towers “sure pushes feminism off the map!” Faludi sets out to trace the grotesque logic that leapfrogged from terrorism to feminism: “Our reflexive reaction to 9/11 – fantastical, weirdly disconnected from the very real emergency at hand – exposed a counterfeit belief system,” she argues. It “divided men from women and mobilised them to the defence of a myth instead of the defence of a country”.

The Terror Dream is Faludi’s account of the origins of this myth and the United States’ endless post-9/11 reprisal of it. And as an exposé of the failures of the fourth estate, it is a master class in debunking. Faludi persuasively demonstrates that the attack on New York launched a concomitant attack on feminism, unleashing a torrent of regressive sexism in response to a sense of national impotence. The sabre-rattling was hard for anyone to miss, but the degree to which it was also directed domestically, and especially at women, comes as a shock, as does the media’s complicity and laxity.

Thus the baseless and inaccurate predictions that American women would respond to 9/11 by abandoning their sterile, unfulfilling careers for domestic warmth, and the prophecies of a baby boom that never came. Thus breathless paeans to the sexy machismo of the Bush administration, rescue workers and the armed forces, over whom women were supposedly swooning. There was the old-school sexism of headlines such as “As War Looms, It’s OK to Let Boys Be Boys Again,” and “We’re at War, Sweetheart,” invoking heroes like John Wayne. Failing the Duke, we were offered “The Stud: Donald Rumsfeld, America’s New Pin-Up”. For less kinky tastes, Time and Newsweek promised us a cartoon president who would be “Lone Ranger” and “dragon-slayer”.

Meanwhile, women were marginalised by the mainstream media – and, Faludi argues, they were excluded from eligibility for “hero” status as well. She convincingly shows the bias at work in the stories of United Flight 93, in which a band of all-American sports heroes stormed the cockpit and overpowered the terrorists. Except they didn’t. The truth, evidently, was less gratifying, although no less heroic: a group tried to fight off the hijackers, but failed to enter the cockpit. And that group included women such as Sandra Bradshaw, the flight attendant who boiled water to throw on the terrorists but who barely got a mention in the mainstream media. Similarly, firefighters were renamed firemen, and the many female rescue workers erased from the tale.

And then there was Jessica Lynch, portrayed first as an ass-kicking tough girl – although condescendingly, as “spunky” – and when that story was disproved, as fragile “precious little Jessi”, a career soldier remade into an American innocent “probably” raped by savage Arabs. Again, the US media – from laziness as much as jingoism – made it up as they went. British journalists who went to Iraq to check the facts heard quite different tales. The Iraqi doctors and nurses were – according to Lynch herself, whom Faludi interviewed – taking excellent care of her after a devastating car wreck, and trying to return her to the US army. American forces staged a “rescue” and stormed the hospital, exploding doors even as they were handed keys and handcuffing doctors and patients to their bed frames. And who got the blame in the US press? Feminists, for allegedly trying to pass Lynch off as a “female Rambo”. Any remotely feminist argument was instantly denounced as unpatriotic; add the 40% drop in federal prosecutions of sex discrimination cases, and Faludi offers a convincing case for a wholesale assault on women’s rights in the name of national security.

There is some dark comedy along the way: John Kerry, while trying to out-macho Bush in 2004 by casting himself as a deerslayer straight out of Fenimore Cooper, talked about crawling through the brush on his stomach, prompting derisive jeering from the gun lobby: “If you’re a 14-point buck and get shot in the toe this autumn, you’ll know who to sue.” Noting that instead of the leader we needed, we got “a chest-beater in a borrowed flight suit, instructing us to max out our credit cards”, Faludi argues that Kerry’s strategic error was in neglecting to rescue some distressed damsels, repeatedly implying that if he had cast himself as father-protector, he might not have lost the election. This is pretty unconvincing: gender politics are hardly sufficient to explain Kerry’s catastrophic tactical blunders.

But Faludi is only getting warmed up: she has even bigger claims to make. In the book’s second half, Kerry’s deerslaying antics prompt an attempt to explain the relentless gendering of America’s post-9/11 conception of national security, as she takes us on an energetic, whistle-stop tour of America’s frontier myths. This précis is much less original and more problematic than the book’s first half – which would matter less if Faludi didn’t try so hard to make it the alpha and omega of America’s response to 9/11.

From Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 account of her capture by Native Americans to Patty Hearst and right up to Lynch, Faludi traces a long genealogy of American damsels in distress: the “maiden’s rescue, fantasised or real, became our reigning redemption tale”.

“Many scholars of American culture,” she writes in rather too generalised terms, “see our national preoccupation with female rescue as mere cover story, a pretext employed to justify the sanguinary pleasure our pioneers took in the slaughter of the continent’s natives and the decimation of the wilderness. That is: first we conquered, then we made up a fiction of defiled womanhood to rationalise it.”

For Faludi, that fiction has its roots in captivity narratives, the stories of women captured by Indians that were among the first American bestsellers. Trying to encapsulate a 200-year complex literary history, and its scholarship, in 100 pages (never a good idea), Faludi recounts the deeply entertaining tales of women such as Rowlandson, Hannah Duston (who liberated herself from her kidnappers by braining nine of them with a tomahawk, and then scalping them for the reward), and Cynthia Ann Parker, the woman whose story loosely “inspired” The Searchers. It is encouraging to see these tales revived in a popular form, as they are too little remembered today. But Faludi’s argument soon becomes grandiose. She claims that captivity narratives are the only indigenous US literary genre (except for their relation to conversion narratives, jeremiads, discovery narratives, slave narratives, sentimental novels and gothic novels, that’s convincing); that in the half century after Rowlandson, “the nation’s bestsellers, with the one exception of Pilgrim’s Progress, were all captivity narratives”, an oversimplifying, misleading claim that ignores Puritans’ love of religious tracts, conduct manuals, philosophical and political treatises and the Bible, not to mention intractable problems in measuring colonial “bestsellers”. No matter. “Our foundational drama as a society,” Faludi insists, was “murderous homeland incursions by dark-skinned, non-Christian combatants under the flag of no recognised nation.”

Thus 9/11 was “not, in fact, an inconceivable event; it was the [Faludi’s emphasis] characteristic and formative American ordeal, the primal injury of which we could not speak … Our ancestors had already fought a war on terror, a very long war, and we have lived with its scars ever since.” Really? It is hard to understand how psychic trauma is passed down generationally; Faludi attempts to evade this with metaphors of a “cultural bloodstream”, a national “genetic code”, which are just that – metaphors. But the very premise is flawed: not all captivity narratives, let alone all our foundational dramas (there are others), involve a “homeland” incursion, an anachronistic formulation to begin with (Puritans like Rowlandson viewed England as the homeland, and the New World as howling wilderness). But even if we accept the premise, fears of Indians did not invoke only cowboys: Calamity Jane, anyone? Plenty of tough women populate durable American myths. And they inhabit the post-9/11 landscape, too, but Faludi has enacted her own erasures. According to the book’s index, Hillary Clinton is mentioned only three times, and Condoleezza Rice only twice, in a book examining gender, power and national security after 9/11.

Ultimately, Faludi is guilty of her own exaggerations and myth-making, strong-arming her argument into submission – which is a pity, because it was so unnecessary. Her demonstration of resurgent sexism and the dangers of a negligent or biased media in the post-9/11 landscape has no need of a dubious genesis myth that reinscribes American exceptionalism: it is quite formidable enough to defend itself.

Sarah Churchwell is a senior lecturer in American literature at the University of East Anglia.